Life journey of reports in ERP

Reports are backbone of any establishment.

●       Reports are Business’s companion

●       Helps in decision making

●       One can tell a story about the enterprise using these reports

●       Used in reconciling transactions, during audits and Budgeting

●       Helps in problem solving, identifying leaks and rectifying any mistakes

Olden days:

Transactions entered in computer system, is queried and printed in a dot matrix printer. Monthly statements are all printed in scores of paper and validated. People used to spend hours in auditing.

This was the time when Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) started its stronghold. Data normalization was a star at that time. Popular databases: Foxpro, DB2, and Oracle. Graphical representation of data was limited, and people used to go through dot matrix outputs.

Then Templates came into existence. This was a big change. Software provided the ability to design pages and print the data at various places in the given page. Data were shown in different format and colors too. The report can be printed in pre-printed sheets. Like check leaves, Government forms etc. It made their life a lot easier. Some of the popular tools: Oracle's developer 2000, Oracle discoverer, Crystal reports, PHP reporting.

Now data and templates got separated. Multiple templates used in presenting the same data. Example: Managers in each country would like to see the total spend in their currency, Purchase order, balance sheets in their formats etc.

XML publisher, EIS Express reporting tool, Adobe InDesign, Eclipse BIRT, JasperReports, APEX Office Print, PL/PDF all come under this category. Data converted to XML, the software will merge this XML data to the template. Outputs can be of docx, xlsx, PDF formats.

As data and templates got matured, focus moved towards Business Intelligence. Trends and analysis. It reviews millions of transactions and provides its analysis in a user-friendly manner.  The transactions are moved into a data warehouse in denormalized tables. ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) used to push data into data warehouse. Siebel CRM, OBIEE and Tableau were some of the Business Intelligence products. 

Bigger companies started using this. It gave an opportunity to drill down from companywide results till each unit/department level.   Creating a huge value for business.

As business intelligence got matured, many cloud ERP products started offering this functionality. Cloud HCM, Workday, Salesforce, SplashBI are some in these lines.

Data science is the fancy word today. Focus started moving towards predictive analysis.  By going through historical information, the future is predicted.  Algorithms were used to identify what can happen in future. Oracle crystal ball, IBM SPSS predictive analysis enterprise, Microsoft R Open, TIBCO Statista, SplashBI are some of predictive analysis products.

The next growth will be in unstructured data. Doing a data science on this will be a challenging task, but it can provide valuable information like:

1.      Companies started acknowledging social communication within their employees. Data science can be used on this to find out their employee’s mood.

2.      Market Research can be done to identify Customer demands.